European Sociological Association 2015

Work, Employment and Industrial Relations

Reconsidering work and employment: through the case of French artisanship

 

The current economic crisis reveals some uncertainty in financial and industrial fields of economies, disturbing the relationship between the labour and the capital and increasing inequalities. Artisanship in France is an economical sector that includes a majority of small businesses with fewer than 10 employees in nearly 500 different trades which appears like an analytic key of the present situation. In these organisations where work is essentially related to manual skills, the capital is maintained at its lower level – for legal reasons – and its power is not supposed to increase. This maybe what makes crafts a possible solution against the rise of unemployment and provides its units a relative capacity to resist to crisis effects and economic pressures.Artisanship as a locally rooted manual productions made for a locally rooted markets leads to ask many questions about work and labour market’s functioning in today’s globalization context.What does work mean when it comes to artisanship in France? What about the individual and the collective patterns of artisan work? Who are French manual trades’ owners and workers? What are the labour market specificities? What are the meaning and the relevance of solidarity in artisanship organisations and labour market?The theoretical challenge here is to answer these questions knowing that the prism of crafts remains minor in the long research’s tradition on the field of work. This means that the first question is about the possible use of conceptual tools produced within the industrial field to apprehend work in artisanship.